Alternate title: "The Snorting Wonder of the Plains." As Paul Di Filippo says at Weird Universe, "This cover could hardly be improved upon for macabre glee and impartial offensiveness." Read the story here.

"Faster Now" is a short story about a near-future world where brain hackers called "now tweakers" (nowts) use their time-management skills to get a leg up on normals. It's by Paul Di Filippo, who wrote many excellent essays and stories for the zine version of Boing Boing.

In a short interview from September, Mel Brooks reflects on the history of Young Frankenstein, which he calls "his greatest movie" (an assessment that's hard to argue with, given how brilliant it was, though the competition is stiff!).

Charlie Stross's "Merchant Princes" series-- a sly, action-packed romp that blends heroic fantasy, military science fiction, economics, politics, and alternate worlds -- originally published as six mass-market paperbacks, is now available in three handy trade-paperbacks.

"His hair was whiter than his flesh. Thick whorls of ice embedded his beard in icicles like a January cataract; more separated the thick hairs of his eyebrows into individual daggers, pushed back by the yuletide winds of the stratosphere so that they swept down to meet at the bridge of his narrow, blue-tinged nose."

Crystal writes, "Love indie fiction? Want a choose-your-price set of Weird Fiction ebooks that will help support the Helsinki bid for Worldcon? We want to bring Worldcon to Helsinki in 2017, to boldly go where no Worldcon has gone before.

Two beautiful posters for the forthcoming Star Wars movie by artist and illustrator Phil Noto: Color, Black and White. “I got so excited after watching the trailer, I had to do some art,” says Phil. “Felt like 6 y.o. me drawing Luke Skywalker after seeing Ep. 4.”

Charlie Stross lays out the state of aging: "cognitive functioning burdened by decades of memories to integrate, canalized by prior experiences, dominated by the complexity of long-term planning at the expense of real-time responsiveness...truck by intricate, esoteric cross-references to that which has gone before."

SS Taylor and Katherine Roy’s adventurous YA series continues in a second volume that gets everything right: it’s a steampunked alternate history story that’s full of intrigue and light-touch, thoughtful critique of imperialism and colonialism, a story that lets you love your pith helmet while still questioning all that it stands for. Cory Doctorow (who loved book one) reviews the second Expeditioners book.

Paul Ford's short story "One Day, I Will Die on Mars," depicts a chilling, all-too-believable dystopian world where Uber becomes a massive transhuman immortal colony-organism that treats its labor force as its gut-flora, to be continuously measured and perfected or discarded.

Saga, the creator-owned gonzo science fiction comic from Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples may be the best sf comic since Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, and the three collections published to date are already canon, with the long-awaited number four around the corner. To get all your friends ready for it, there’s a new gorgeous, massive hardcover volume collecting the first three installments.

Thomas Richner spent more than 140 hours scratch-building a spectacularly detailed cardboard model of Star Wars's Millennium Falcon, working with scrap cardboard boxes and then shooting his model on a green-screen and compositing onto backgrounds from the movies.

​Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell is a new short story I wrote for Vice Magazine's just-launched science fiction section Terraform, which also has new stories up by Claire Evans, Bruce Sterling, and Adam Rothstein.

It's a hell of an sf story, about the advent of a life-extension drug and the ensuing ghettos of "geezers" who live on the margins of society, marching towards 100 and higher, avoiding armed teen vigilantes -- and the parallel world they discover.

The $20 R2D2 measuring cup set decomposes into four measuring cups and his legs turn into four measuring spoons.

This set of R2-D2 Measuring Cups disassembles into 4 measuring cups plus 4 measuring spoons and reassembles in a snap (fortunately, it's not as complicated as C-3PO). Each has its measurement written inside so you can't forget what they are and handles on the back that don't distract from R2's aesthetic. The only problem we can foresee with these is that if you show somebody else your R2-D2 Measuring Cups, you may have to install a restraining bolt to keep them from wandering off.